many thanks for the replies
Imo, catapults in civ 3 and 5 work perfect. They can bombard the city from far and that's it! That's their role. Bombard the defenses down and retreat.
In RFCCW they could have 2 functions, like bombers in civ 4. One for bringing the defense down, and another to cause collateral damage(which may of course miss some time).
Yeah, siege units as bombarders sounds better.
we can try keeping catapults and lowering their attack to 0. will the AI use them properly? the thing that makes me doubt this is that there is no UnitAI type for bombarding defenses. if someone wants to try it, just give catapults 0 attack and see if the AI brings them to a siege.
Without catapults some cities are impossible to take. Like as a Roman Dacian capital with few archers and UU there.
any city can be taken as long as you bring enough units. another possibility in a world without catapults is giving the city raider promotions the ability to bypass fortification defense. fortification defense could also be lowered a bit overall. I think it would have to be.
Regarding H&H, nerfing base stats and enhancing bonuses from buildings sounds good.
this is not exactly what I am proposing. what I am proposing is to leave everything as is and then cut the final number in half. the resources and the buildings would still have the same utility relative to each other. in a large empire with many health resources cities would still grow larger than they otherwise would, but they would not grow as large as they do now without buildings.
Good solution would be to make food resources only give +1 food and no health (you need buildings for that) and happiness would give less happiness or only commerce.
I should really go over the whole thing. for example I just realized that Markets, which give happiness with silk, pepper, pearls or ivory, are much better for Indian or Chinese civs than anyone else (I swear it was unintentional haha) so I think I should remove pearls and add dye and fur.
the great thing about the overall 50% nerf though is that it gives more scope for variation among the resources and buildings.
Hey sprt, I read in your post you weren't sure about Japan, so I played a UHV game with them to try to see if there was anything that stuck out.
The 1st UHV is good. You can do it by about 390 AD. The 3rd UHV is too easy however. You need to conquer 3 provinces in Korea anyway to get enough XP for your Hainwas to take down the 3 cities in Japan, I ended up finishing it when I got the 1st UHV (conquered Utou).
hmmm that certainly wasn't the intended order of conquest
Past the conquering, there are quite a few difficulties. Since Japan doesn't really have much of a commerce base, there are some serious monetary problems. After taking all of Korea and Japan you are losing serious gold, compounded by the fact that you have a research goal in 450 AD. I don't think it's possible to do. I tried my hardest, I found and traded with every civ possible, I played a serious specialist game, and everything else I could think of. Even after all that I was still about 50 turns away from completing the 2nd UHV (I had just gotten Engineering and was reseraching Paper, still had to do Steel Working). One of the problems is that by the time you get to researching Jurisprudence nobody else has the techs you're researching so the UP isn't super useful. Another problem is that it's not super easy to use GP to research since the scientists want to research Cartography and it's too difficult to get the engineers. My suggestions/thoughts on playing them
1. UHV 1 is fine.
2. UHV 2 is too hard. Japan either needs more workable tiles in Japan itself, for the costs of Steel Working and Paper as well as the costs of techs they require to be reduced (SW is like 10000 beakers), for the specialist research paths to be changed, or just different techs or goals.
3. UHV 3 should be some Buddhism goal since historically, Buddhism spreads in Japan during the 6th century. The current one is easy.
I will play them and try some changes. what was the political situation in China like in your game?
there are already a lot of Buddhist goals. Tocharians, Goguryeo, Vietnam, Tibet, Khmer partially. otherwise I agree it would be a good choice. what about higher culture than Korea or China? indy cities could count.
edit: sprt, are you planning importing K-mod here? Please say please, it would make this modmod even better.
this has been tried by me and others and never got to a playable state. I have personally tried starting with k-mod and adding rfc elements. the spawning and flipping mechanics all worked, but any attempt to make the AI behave historically just led to weird results eveytime and everything I did to try to help just made it weirder. I also dicovered that the autoplay was not any faster. from what he told me Leoreth's experience was broadly similar. I also tried starting with my mod and adding unitAI and pathfinding stuff from k-mod, but everything I added required something else from k-mod and after a while I lost faith that it would ever end. this kind of work is exhausting on the brain and spirit. you can spend hours investigating something and feel more in the dark than you did before you started. bear in mind I have zero training, all I know is CivIV. sometimes you just have to drop it and go back to playing the mod.
One thought I have at the moment is that the Mauryan Edict probably needs to be changed a bit - the bonus to piety is useless now that piety has been removed. Maybe give them a +1 bonus to happiness if Buddhism is state religion, to help with the early unhappiness problems for the Mauryans?
that piety thing was just left over text. it gives -25% maintenance, which I think they need
Also, if the tech goals are balanced for Monarch, then can the tech requirements be set the same for Emperor too? I prefer playing Emperor for the greater challenge, but increasing the tech requirements can make it impossible to achieve some tech goals. With the higher number of barbs and AI benefits on Emperor I would say there's no need for techs to need extra beakers as well.
yes this is a good idea. maybe not quite the same, but only a little harder.
